The following is a father's advice to his son or daughter, who has just graduated from high school：

    First of all, congratulations on your graduation!Graduation from high school means that a new stage of life is ahead of you．At the beginning of this new stage, I have some advice for you．

    Clean your own room and do your own laundry(洗衣物的活). After you have messed up(弄乱)something, you should learn to clean it up yourself．Cleanliness is indeed close to godliness(信奉上帝)．

    Don't mistake knowledge for wisdom. No matter how much information or knowledge you have gained, you'll never make sound(正确的)judgments if you don't have wisdom. Wisdom comes from imagination and reflection(反省)．If you can imagine the possible future outcomes of your present decisions and actions, you can avoid mistakes．And if you can reflect on the mistakes you have made, you can avoid making the same mistakes again and again．Such is wisdom．

    Don't complain．When you take up a job, do your best to carry it out．Don't waste time complaining about it, no matter how difficult and boring it is．

    Finally, be an early bird．If you get up earlier than the sun, you can watch it rising up slowly into the sky．And the sight of the rising sun will warm your heart and give you energy for the day ahead．Besides, being an early bird, you have plenty of time to take exercise or do a lot of work．

    Why read, and sometimes even write poetry? That question is not difficult to answer if we change the word poetry to songs.

    I sing when I feel good. When I sing my favorite songs, I feel even better. Sometimes when I am listening to music and to the song words, I feel that it was written for me. A good song always makes me feel something. There are songs that I sing in my head between classes and songs that I want to sing when the school bell rings by the end of the day. They help me get through the day.

    They are like bright and warm colors in the middle of grays and shades. I like songs about love and friendship. The extraordinary thing is that my feelings are more special when I sing my favorite songs in English.

    I also like reading. I used to avoid poetry until an e-friend told me I should recite poems and not look up the meaning of the words. Poetry uses many difficult words and idioms, but the best thing is to just forget about them. In the beginning I felt quite strange. Now I always lock the door. Reading aloud gives you a strange feeling, but when you have some practice and fall into the rhythm, and the sounds of the words, it is really a special experience.

    I started with small poems, but now I think I most like long poems. I have different feelings with different poems. When I have had a bad day at school, I read Keats and forget everything. When I am sad I read Wordsworth by the light of a candle. When the poem is finished, I close the book and my sadness is gone.

    Let's face it. No one drinks diet sodas for the taste. People drink diet sodas in the hope that it will help them lose weight or at least keep them from gaining it. Yet it seems to have exactly the opposite effect, according to a new study.

    Researchers from the University of Texas said those who drank two or more diet sodas a day had waist size increases that were six times greater than those who didn't drink diet sodas. ＂What we saw was that the more diet sodas a person drank, the more weight they were likely to gain,＂ said Sharon Fowler.

The study was based on data from 474 participants in a large, ongoing research project, where the participants were followed for nearly 10 years.

    While the findings are surprising, they also offer some explanations.

    Nutrition expert, Melanie Rogers, who works with overweight patients in New York, has found that when patients are switched from regular to diet sodas, they don't lose weight at all. ＂We weren't seeing weight loss necessarily, and that was confusing to us,＂ said Rogers.

    So why would diet soda cause weight gain? No one knows for sure yet, but it could be that people think they can eat more if they drink diet sodas, and so over-compensate for the missing calories.

    A related study found some sweeteners (甜味剂) raised blood sugar levels in some mice. ＂Data from this and other potential studies suggest that the promotion of diet sodas and artificial sweeteners may be risky,＂ said Helen P. Hazuda, professor at the University of Texas's school of medicine. ＂They may be free of calories, but not of consequences.＂

    When Warren Buffett was asked about the secret to his wealth and success, he said that he read every day—500 pages. Unfortunately, if you're already working 9-5, you might not have the time to read at all, let alone an entire book a day. But what if you could get the benefits of reading without sacrificing all of your free time? You can! With the Blinkist app, you get the key learning from the best notification books in minutes, not hours or days. Our experts transform these books into quick, memorable, easy-to-understand insights. Start with the 3 most-read titles on self-improvement and see if you don't feel a little more satisfied already.

    ⒈Thirteen Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do by Amy Morin

    12min

    Read it on Blinklst

    You can't escape misfortune in life. But you can change how you respond it. Do you struggle to get over your failures? Or talk a lot about things out of your control? Getting over these obstacles can have a very great influence on your everyday life. Morin shares how her most successful therapy patients overcame these difficulties.

    ⒉How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie

    19min

    Read it on Blinklst

    How would you feel it someone told you on Sunday evening that, come Monday morning, you would be thrown into a torture chamber（刑讯室）? Would you worry? Probably. But there would be a way to deal with those worries. Ever wondered why you can't stop worrying about something? No matter how hard you try, are you always thinking and talking on the same issue? By defining the source of your stress, you can get over it once and for all. Carnegie came up with a timeless formula that helps you handle any overthinking situation.

    ⒊How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth and Karen Dillon

    13min

    Read it on Blinklst

    What do you think would make you happier at work? Perhaps a little more pay might be nice, or maybe some more admiration from fellow colleagues. Are you making the right trade-offs in life? While career achievements can be satisfying, neglecting your family and friends can be harmful in the long-run – in ways you can't even imagine.

    As for old people, some of the applications are hard to use because they didn't grow up with them. They don't have simple models of how they should work, what to do when something doesn't work or where to go for help. We make it as easy as possible to be used for people who are not familiar with the technology.

    I think there is huge potential and we are designing it. The ability to connect to friends, who remember the same movies and news and music, is really important, especially as people get old. They end up in retirement homes and they aren't always close to their friends. Allowing the network to help them connect with friends and family is a really powerful thing.

    My mother is an enthusiastic user of the Internet，although it took me years to get her to use e-mail. She was born with normal hearing, but lost it when she was 3.She was totally deaf for many years, until age 53, when she got ear aids. They work really well. That is a big change for her. But before then, her friends couldn't call her on the phone, so they insisted she use e-mail to communicate with them.

    Young people don't even think of the Internet as technology. It's just there, and they use it. There's been a very interesting change in communications styles between old people and young people. There are some kids who are now in their teens and aren't willing to make phone calls. And they think of e-mail as old-fashioned and slow.

    The reason why teens don't make phone calls seems to be that they don't know what to say. When they call they often stop for a while. They don't know what to say，and there's this silence. On the other hand, texting is considered proper, and it's okay if you don't answer. You might have been distracted. It's not considered rude. But it is considered strange if you're in this kind of voice conversation and simply stop talking.

    Play time is in short supply for young children these days and the lifelong consequences for developing children can be more serious than many people realize.

    An article in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Play details not only how much children's play time has declined, but how this lack of play affects emotional development, leading to the rise of anxiety, depression, and problems of attention and self control. “Since about 1955, children's free play has been continually declining, at least partly because adults have applied ever-increasing control over children's activities.” says the author Peter Gray, Ph. D, Professor of Psychology at Boston College.

    We can describe the unstructured freely-chosen play as a testing ground for life. It provides critical life experiences without which young children cannot develop into confident and competent adults. So kids need more of it, not less. Because play is how young children learn important social and emotional skills such as sharing, cooperating, communicating, and empathizing. It helps them develop fit bodies, strong minds, and brave hearts, so they can take on new challenges and risky situations.

    Gray's article is meant to serve as a wake-up call regarding the effects of lost play. We must know that lack of childhood free play time is a huge loss that must be paid attention to for the sake of our children and society. But parents who keep a lookout over and disturb their children's play are a big part of the problem. It is hard to find groups of children outdoors at all, and, if you do find them, they are likely to be wearing school uniforms and following the directions of coaches while their parents dutifully watch and cheer.

    Actually, when children are in charge of their own play, it provides a foundation for their future mental health as older children and adults. Play gives children a chance to find and develop a connection to their own self-identified and self-guided interest. It is through play that children first learn to make decisions, solve problems, improve self-control, and follow rules. Play helps children make friends and learn to get along with each other as equals. Most importantly, play is a source of happiness.

When parents realize the major role that free play can take in the development of emotionally healthy children and adults, they may wish to reassess the priorities ruling their children's lives. The needs for childcare, academic and athletic success and children's safety is important. But perhaps parents can begin to identify small changes——such as openings in the schedule, backing off from quite so many supervised (有监督的) activities, and possibly slightly less keeping watch on the playground that would start the slow returning to the direction of free, imaginative-directed play.